Summary

Chris is the Co-founder, Administrator, Architect, Chief Editor and Shameless Hack who wrote and runs The Code Project. He's been programming since 1988 while pretending to be, in various guises, an astrophysicist, mathematician, physicist, hydrologist, geomorphologist, defence intelligence researcher and then, when all that got a bit rough on the nerves, a web developer. He is a Microsoft Visual C++ MVP both globally and for Canada locally.

His programming experience includes C/C++, C#, SQL, MFC, ASP, ASP.NET, and far, far too much FORTRAN. He has worked on PocketPCs, AIX mainframes, Sun workstations, and a CRAY YMP C90 behemoth but finds notebooks take up less desk space.

He dodges, he weaves, and he never gets enough sleep. He is kind to small animals.

Chris was born and bred in Australia but splits his time between Toronto and Melbourne, depending on the weather. For relaxation he is into road cycling, snowboarding, rock climbing, and storm chasing.

The ASP.NET Wiki was started by Scott Hanselman in February of 2008. The idea is that folks spend a lot of time trolling the blogs, googlinglive-searching for answers to common "How To" questions. There's piles of fantastic community-created and MSFT-created content out there, but if it's not found by a search engine and the right combination of keywords, it's often lost.

The ASP.NET Wiki articles moved to CodeProject in October 2013 and will live on, loved, protected and updated by the community.

The CodeProject Experts Advisory group is comprised of CodeProject members specifically chosen to advise the CodeProject on new products related to helping the community answer technical questions. This group participates in beta testing and feedback of products designed to help connect members with experts.

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The Code Project Daily Insider keeps you up to date with what is happening around the industry. From the continue saga of the Big Boys to Scott Guthrie's blog ramblings and Steve Jobs' latest, you will find it here.

In January 2005, David Cunningham and Chris Maunder created TheUltimateToolbox.com, a new group dedicated to the continued development, support and growth of Dundas Software’s award winning line of MFC, C++ and ActiveX control products.

Ultimate Grid for MFC, Ultimate Toolbox for MFC, and Ultimate TCP/IP have been stalwarts of C++/MFC development for a decade. Thousands of developers have used these products to speed their time to market, improve the quality of their finished products, and enhance the reliability and flexibility of their software.

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We're past hump week, if such a thing were actually possible in this challenge[^], and we're starting to see the applications come to life. Overall the contestants' apps are coming together and they guys are focusing more on showcasing the Ultrabook and Windows 8 API than merely grinding out the framework code for their application. The contest has gone from "how am I going to get this done" to "how can I make it rock their socks?", and has expanded to more philosophical and design discussions on the nature of the Ultrabook and what it means for user interaction.

Lee is powering ahead. As a reminder he is working on an application that combines social messaging with random pot-luck. His OpenGL-to-DirectX 11 translation engine is working. He has NFC happening (after a little device foreplay - really, too much information) as well as a bunch of other Ultrabook specific support that is truly keeping with the spirit of showing off the Ultrabook hardware and Windows 8 API. Check out his videos if you like a little time-lapse craziness.

George and Suresh at Blue innovations look like they're close to being done with their MoneyBags 2.0. They are, methodically, working through their list of Ultrabook features they wish to support (I think it''s all of them, at last check) and have gone as far as to provide an eBook detailing their progress and their earned wisdom. Grab yourself a copy of A Simple Guide to Ultrabook Development. An important UI issue these lads have discussed is ease of use of the touchscreen. Grab a tablet or iPad and think about how easy it is to reach various parts of the screen. On a 3.5" screen it's all accessible. On a 7" the centre bits take a little wiggling. On a 13" touchscreen laptop there are definitely parts of a screen that are easier to hit than others and an application's design should take this into account. Their use of hidden menus, though, would draw a serious, horizontal-brow'd frown from Jakob Nielson. Don't make your application an adventure game. It should all be obvious.

John and Gavin are also in a great personal space. They are feature complete. Complete with bugs and with optimisations to be done, but complete. They mirror comments made by others that hover is dead. Anyone who's written an app or a website optimised for touch knows that you don't have a mouse or cursor. Unless you insist on stylus based devices, you crazy cat, you. Touchscreens may, in future, have the ability to detect your finger from a centimetre away and provide hover events, but for the moment it's binary: you're touching or you're not.

Sagar loves a little drama and did what any red blooded developer would do when given a pre-release piece of hardware running a pre-release OS with pre-release drivers: he tried upgrading to RTM bits. You can picture how that went. Regardless, their Shufflr video sampler application is fully bean-bag enabled using the inclination and accelerometers. Quick tilt-and-back to flip to the next video. Tilt-and-hold to scan through a video. Very nice.

Andrea is continuing to work on his language trainer. It's coming along, but as I've said in previous posts: I'd like to see something that more fully showcases the Ultrabook. At the very least a discussion on the ins-and-outs of developing touch screen UIs for web applications would be valuable.

Overall, we're close. The Intel Developer Forum is next week so contestants will have a week off to booze, I mean, discuss strategy with peers in informal round-tables, so there will be a break in the regular scheduling.

Initially I thought my vote for the top app was sewn up early. However, as we see how the contestant think, and how they approach the application development process, I'm now torn in 3 different directions. Pushing the boundary hard and far always gets point from me, but sitting down and methodically working through the issues to produce an app that makes sense, rather than on;y being a showcase, shows a deeper commitment to me.

We only have two more weeks for each to finalise their offerings. This will be interesting.